#maneatingplants

An old thread i done on abovetopsecret

Whilst researching various cryptids I came upon and interesting one it’s the man eating tree, yes you read that right.  There have been various legends dating back as far as the 1800’s, although there are many carnivorous plants such as the Nepenthes mirabilis found in many regions such as Borneo, Sumatra, Thailand, Peninsular Malaysia, Sulawesi, Maluku, Myanmar, Cambodia, New Guinea, Australia, Philippines, Indochina, China, Hong Kong, Micronesia, Macau and Palau and the Heliamphora typically found in Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil I have never heard of a man eating tree.  As various legends have it these trees are large enough to kill a full sized human by constricting them in its branches. Members of the Mkodo tribe of Madagascar offered a woman in sacrifice to the dreaded tree. So I decided to do a little digging to see if I could come up with something on this. I found info on this tree from the following site; 

For the most part the aforementioned are mere annoyances, but there are other things in Madagascar that can make you twitch your last.  The most notorious is the so-called man-eating tree of Madagascar. The first European description of this bulbous tree, a kind of elephantine Venus flytrap, appeared in the South Australian Register of 1881. In horrifying detail, the author tells how he watched aghast as members of the Mkodo tribe offered a woman in sacrifice to the dreaded tree, whose white, transparent leaves reminded him of the quivering mouthparts of an insect:  The slender delicate palpi, with the fury of starved serpents, quivered a moment over her head, then as if instinct with demoniac intelligence fastened upon her in sudden coils round and round her neck and arms; then while her awful screams and yet more awful laughter rose wildly to be instantly strangled down again into a gurgling moan, the tendrils one after another, like great green serpents, with brutal energy and infernal rapidity, rose, retracted themselves, and wrapped her about in fold after fold, ever tightening with cruel swiftness and savage tenacity of anacondas fastening upon their prey.

www.pbs.org...  It has been suggested that this tree is a fabrication as no one has come upon it again or the Mkodo tribe that is said to exist there. (Read the whole page on that site, some really freaky plants are there)  From another site 

Several blood-drinking trees are reported from around the world. The man-eating tree of Madagascar is supposed to look like a big pineapple and exude a drugged liquid that is addictive. Once victims go far enough inside it, it closes and squeezes all juices out of the victim. Further investigation seems to discount these stories, suggesting instead that the tree exude a poisonous gas that causes animals to die at its base. In any case, either variety of death trees is presently unrecognized by science. The yate-veo tree of Central America is supposed to impale its victims on sharp spikes and then absorb the blood through its trunk, and the Nicaraguan dog-eating tree is supposed to entangle its victims with sticky vines and then suck all their blood out within five minutes.

www.newanimal.org...  It seems they have described it as some sort of vampire tree interesting. There have been suggestions ranging from hoax to a lab experiment (its been suggested that in secret labs there exists a wide range of poisonous, toxic and even people eating plants). Here's an interesting link I stumbled on www.unexplained-mysteries.com... 

It appears that a naturalist, a Mr. Dunstan by name, was botanising in one of the swamps around the Nicaragua Lake. The account goes on to relate that "while hunting for specimens he heard his dog cry out, as if in agony, from a distance. Running to the spot whence the animals cries came, Mr. Dunstan found him enveloped in a perfect network of what seemed to be a fine, rope-like tissue, of roots and fibers. The plant or vine seemed composed entirely of bare, interlacing stems, resembling more than anything else the branches of a weeping willow denuded of its foliage, but of a dark, nearly black hue, and covered with a thick, viscid gum that exuded from the pores. Drawing his knife, Mr. Dunstan attempted to cut the poor beast free, but it was with very great difficulty that he managed to sever the fleshy muscular fibers (sic) of the plant. When the dog was extricated from the coils of the plant, Mr. Dunstan saw to his horror that its body was bloodstained, while the skin appeared to be actually sucked or puckered in spots, and the animal staggered as if from exhaustion. In cutting the vine the twigs curled like living, sinuous fingers about Mr. Dunstan's hand, and it required no slight force to free the member from their clinging grasp, which left the flesh red and blistered. The tree, it seems, is well known to the natives, who relate many stories of its death-dealing powers